US government grants $325 Million to IBM and Nvidia to build 2 world’s fastest Supercomputers

The American government’s Department of Energy has stated and vowed that it would work with the companies like IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox, which would together build two supercomputers, they would be the fastest supercomputers in the world. The supercomputers will be completed with all assembling by 2017. An amount of $325 million will be given to the 3 companies for building up these computers. The supercomputers will be GPU-accelerated, they would be named Sierra and Summit. The build up of there will include IBM’s OpenPower chips, NVIDIA’s new graphics chip Volta and the high speed networking by Mellanox.

The SVP of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, Tom Rosamilia stated, “Today’s announcement marks a shift from traditional supercomputing approaches that are no longer viable as data grows at enormous rates, IBM’s Data Centric approach is a new paradigm in computing, marking the future of open computing platforms and capable of addressing the growing rates of data.”

The companies will hence wire up, and include all of their best softwares on an individual levels into the combined building processes of the two supercomputers. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA said, “Today’s science is tomorrow’s technology. Scientists are tackling massive challenges from quantum to global to galactic scales. Their work relies on increasingly more powerful supercomputers. Through the invention of GPU acceleration, we have paved the path to exascale supercomputing — giving scientists a tool for unimaginable discoveries.”

Out of Sierra and Summit, Summit is more powerful in its capacities, and would be delivering 150-300 peak petaflops. Summit will be available to the civilian and scientific use, wheareas Sierra would be used in nuclear weapon simulations at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Oak Ridge’s supercomputer dubbed Titan is the fastest in the world as of now, these two new inventories are going to be outracing Titan which delivers just 27 peak petaflop.

“The supercomputers will be GPU-accelerated, they would be named Sierra and Summit.”

GPU processing has potential hundreds of times greater than that of conventional CPU’s, and applications like supercomputing such as this are exactly where the resources devoted to making it happen are available.